Expressions of empathy can be healing not only between two people but also between groups.
A new research study by an Arizona State University criminology professor finds that empathy is rarely expressed by criminal justice officials in the aftermath of police killings of unarmed African Americans, potentially missing an opportunity to ease tensions.
Only a year and a half have gone by since Jon Gould arrived at Arizona State University, but as he leaves for California, he said the school he has headed is in excellent shape and poised to do even greater things in the near future.
Gould, a Foundation Professor who has been director of ASU’s School of Criminology and Criminal Justice since January 2020, will be the new dean of the School of Social Ecology at the University of California, Irvine. His last day working at ASU is Oct. 5.
The ASU Foundation has been awarded a $250,000 grant by the American Arbitration Association – International Centre for Dispute Resolution (AAA-ICDR) Foundation to explore the development of a statewide system for conducting Sentinel Event Reviews (SER) of police use of force, particularly among vulnerable populations. The award will also fund several actual SERs to demonstrate the concept.
As protests grew over the death of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement took root nationwide, graduate students at Arizona State University’s School of Criminology and Criminal Justice (SCCJ) wondered about what they might do on their own campus to encourage dialogue and understanding about diversity.
The country’s reckoning with social justice this year has put a spotlight on America’s memorials. Who gets to be remembered forever, and who tells that story?
Big monuments are expensive and immovable, and they can get bogged down in conflicts over cost and design.
Now, a cross-disciplinary team at Arizona State University will use technology to create a new kind of monument that is both universal and intensely personal, called the Augmented Reality Children’s Memorial Marker.
The website shows rows of faces, many smiling, of Native American women and girls in Arizona who are gone — missing or murdered. No one has seen Jamie for over a year. Priscilla was kidnapped from her home and murdered in 1984. Mary worked at the Bright Angel Lodge at the Grand Canyon when she went missing in 1957.
Last Saturday, about halfway through Part 1 of the ASU Center for the Study of Race and Democracy’s two-part Impact Arizona lecture series titled “Race, Crisis and the Future of Democracy,” which was organized in the aftermath of the May 25 police-involved killing of Minneapolis resident George Floyd, the New York Times sent its subscribers a news alert that yet another black man, 27-year-old Rayshard Brooks of Atlanta, had died at the hands of law enforcement.
“Defund the police” has been a popular rallying cry at recent protests across the nation.
Originated by the Black Lives Matter movement and police reform activists, the slogan was introduced to the public last week and is quickly picking up steam with politicians, city councils and mayors throughout the country.
In the United States, managing the tensions between the privileged, politically dominant classes of society and its politically, socially and economically disadvantaged classes, to which communities of color have disproportionately belonged, has always been a central concern of police and the criminal justice system. Some U.S. police agencies were explicitly established in the Civil War era to help preserve slavery and white supremacy.
America’s criminal justice system was already in the process of reforming, but the COVID-19 pandemic could make further progress uncertain, especially if crime jumps when the shutdown ends, according to a panel of prosecutors who spoke at an Arizona State University event on May 6.